One of the problems faced when designing labels for pharmaceutical products is to design a label that can permanently adhere to a stock bottle, and at the same time, contain a detachable section, such as a sticker, that may be permanently adhered to a prescription bottle once removed from the stock bottle. This type of label would be useful to a pharmacist when dispensing medication.
It is commonplace for a pharmacist to dispense pills from large stock bottles into prescription bottles. It is also commonplace for certain medications to be stored in powder form, but be dispensed to the patient as a suspension. For example, amoxycillin is usually stored in a lyophilized state, but dispensed as a suspension. Therefore, the pharmacist must remove a portion of the stored amoxycillin from a stock bottle, and then suspend the powdered amoxycillin in a solvent according to the specifications of the prescription. The suspended amoxycillin may then be dispensed to a patient in a prescription bottle or vial. When dispensing medication in either the solid or liquid form, often the pharmacist provides the patient with instructions to be followed when taking the medication, for example, instructions to "SHAKE WELL," "TAKE WITH FOOD," etc.
Using the labeling systems available today, a pharmacist must consult either a manual, computer program, or written information provided by the pharmaceutical company in order to determine the nature of the instructions that must be provided to the patient with a particular medication. Once the pharmacist determines the nature of the instructions that must be provided to the patient, the pharmacist must either type the information on a label to be attached to the patient's bottle, or adhere a sticker preprinted with the instructions to the patient's bottle. The most commonly used approach is to use preprinted stickers to convey the instructions to the patient. These stickers are usually located on large roll dispensers in a remote area of the stock room. The large roll dispensers frequently hold many different types of instruction stickers. Applying the proper preprinted sticker to the patient's bottle is both time consuming and prone to mistake.
The process is time consuming because the pharmacist must first walk to a different location of the stock room to locate the sticker dispensers. Once the sticker dispensers are located, the pharmacist must then determine which preprinted sticker is required for the particular medication and adhere it to the prescription bottle. This process can take several minutes to accomplish.
This process is also prone to mistake since the possibility of placing the wrong instruction sticker on a prescription bottle increases when all of the instruction stickers are stored together on large rolls. Providing the wrong instructions to the patient when taking medication may sometimes prove dangerous.
Numerous self-adhesive labels are known in the prior art. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,056,827 (Sasso), U.S. Pat. No. 5,472,756 (Sechet), and U.S. Pat. No. 5,172,936 (Sullivan et al.) all disclose self-adhesive labels. However, none of these patents discloses a self-adhesive label which is applied to a pharmaceutical stock bottle which overcomes these problems.